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Listening to the amazing explanations of how the British SAS team came to be caught, handcuffed, publicly humiliated and booted out by the very Libyan opposition groups they'd come to make contact with, I'm not the only one to be marvelling at the incredible series of blunders and Chelm-worthy reasoning behind the debacle.

There has to be some sort of explanation for how an operation came to be approved by a whole chain of operational and political command which involved the use of a helicopter as a supposedly stealthy way to deliver a clandestine team of special forces carrying sensitive transmitting equipment and fake passports.

Anyone who's ever had a night disturbed by a police helicopter pursuing crims or coming airlift accident victims will be in no doubt that arriving via helicopter is one of the least stealthy methods imaginable of turning up for a clandestine rendezvous. What could they have been thinking?

My guess is that the unconscious pull of the romance of the James Bond ethos still impacts on real life secret service and political calculations. Especially where you have someone in charge like William Hague who seems to want to display his macho credentials when demonstrating that he's the Foreign Secretary now. And I bet they all watched the Milk Tray commercials when they were kids....

Here's Shami Chakrabharti, Director of Liberty, the leading human rights advocacy group in the UK, working herself unapologetically into a state of outrage in 2009 in front of a national TV audience about what she insists are human rights violations and acquiescence to torture by the UK government.

But since then, it's emerged that in the same year, she sat through a meeting of the Council of the London School of Economics, of which she is a member, when they refused to listen to the objections of the late Professor Fred Halliday, in a letter specifically addressed to them, about LSE taking money from the Gaddafi regime, inter alia on the grounds of Libya's continuing appalling human rights record. Needless to say, the use of torture is central to the regime's achievement in staying in power for 42 years.

Professor Halliday's letter referred to the continuing brutality and kleptocracy of Gaddafi’s regime and its disregard for human rights.Her failure to act or resign makes her complicity in LSE’s shameless cosmetification of the Gaddafi regime and Gaddafi's son Saif al-Google Gaddafi clear.

In 2009, the LSE was warned against accepting the donation from Libya by Fred Halliday, an emeritus professor of international relations, who has since died. He wrote to the council criticising Libya’s human rights record and the unrestrained celebrations in Tripoli that followed the release of Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, the Lockerbie bomber. Here are some of the highly restrained and unemotional but still convincing reasons Professor Halliday gave the LSE Council for not taking Gaddafi money:

While it is formally the case that the QF is not part of the Libyan state, and is registered in Switzerland as an NGO, this is, in all practical senses, a legal fiction. The monies paid into the QF come from foreign businesses wishing to do business, i.e. receive contracts, for work in Libya, most evidently in the oil and gas industries. These monies are, in effect, a form of down payment, indeed of taxation, paid to the Libyan state, in anticipation of the award of contracts. The funds of the QF are, for this reason, to all intents and purposes, part of the Libyan state budget. ‘NGO status’, and recognition of such by UN bodies, means, in real terms, absolutely nothing.

Mention has been made, in verbal and written submissions to the School and in correspondence to myself, of the membership of the QF’s advisory board: a somewhat closer examination of the most prominent politicians involved, and of their reputations and business dealings, should also give cause for some concern.

(ii) That the President of the QF, and its effective director, is himself the son of the ruler, and, for all the informality of the Libyan political system (even the ‘Leader’, Colonel Qaddafi, has no formal position), in effect a senior official of that regime, confirms this analysis. In Arab states many of the most important positions have no official title, and kinship, and informal links, are more important than state function – and this, above all, in Libya.

(iii) Much is made by supporters of the QF grant of the fact that Libya is changing internally. This may or may not be the case – it is simply much too early to say. Certainly, the overwhelming balance of informed press conference, and the reports of human rights organisations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, is that while some of the worst excesses have, for the moment ceased, Libya has made no significant progress in protecting the rights of citizens, or migrant workers and refugees, and remains a country run by a secretive, erratic and corrupt elite. Perhaps part of the problem here is a misunderstanding by colleagues of the role of the ‘liberal’ wing within such states. It is not a question of whether or not they are ‘sincere’ – they may well be – but of what their function is: in Libya, as in such states as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran the primary function of such liberal elements is not to produce change, but to reach compromises with internal hard-liners that serve to lessen external pressure. So it has been, since 2002, with the various Libyan initiatives affecting LSE and the UK/US foreign policy establishment in general.

(iv) Much is made of Libya’s altered position in international relations. For sure, and for reasons of its own, the Libyan government has, above all since 9/11, negotiated compromises with the west on a number of issues, notably Lockerbie and nuclear weapons. Its leaders have met a number of politicians and diplomats from foreign countries. This is all to the good. But it is worth being cautious here. First, because tactical changes in foreign policy are not, for the purposes of evaluating political and academic links, sufficient. Secondly, because, although in some areas of foreign policy the country has changed, in others it has not: it continues to call for solution to the Arab-Israeli dispute that in effect, involves the abolition of both the Israeli and Palestinian states; it is using its money and influence to provoke extremism in southern Africa; its leader has recently called for the abolition of a sovereign European state – Switzerland. Among the guests of honour at the 1 September 2009 celebrations in Tripoli was the leader of the Somali pirates, operating and menacing international shipping in the Horn of Africa. I will not dwell here on the summer’s events surrounding Lockerbie: suffice it to say that Libya’s handling of this has not been characterised by either consistency or clarity.

(v) The most important issue of all is that of reputational risk to LSE. I have myself defended acceptance by the School of grants from some authoritarian countries (e.g. Arab Gulf states): but there should be clear limits on this, depending on the degree of political and human rights abuses perpetrated with them and on their ongoing foreign policy conduct. Here I would draw attention not just to the prevailing consensus in Whitehall and the City, which are now happy, for their own legitimate reasons, to do business with Libya, but to broader reputational concerns in regard to British and American public opinion, particularly with regard to Lockerbie. For these and other reason the same concern applies across the Middle East, in the Arab world as much as in Israel, where reserve about this state, and about its more prominent ‘liberal’ representatives, remains high. And for good reason.

"Leaked minutes of [the] Council meeting which considered [Professor Halliday's letter] reveal that senior officials feared embarrassing Saif Gaddafi, chairman of the foundation, by rejecting the cash. They also claimed there was “no evidence” that LSE’s links with Libya had attracted controversy.

According to the document, Prof David Held, co-director of the university’s Centre for the Study of Global Governance, said that a “public signing ceremony had been undertaken and a U-turn at this juncture might affect the school’s relations with Libya and cause personal embarrassment to the chairman of the foundation”.

Prof Held, who taught Gaddafi during his time at LSE, added: “The views espoused by Professor Halliday were not necessarily shared by all in the academic community; that, having trawled traditional media and the blogosphere, no evidence had been found that LSE’s links with Libya had attracted criticism, despite the ‘storm’ created by the Al-Megrahi affair.”

Chakrabharti not only sat through the meeting listening to this garbage, but she must have got the minutes and read through them without considering them incompatible with her human rights credentials.

She seems to be in it up to her neck as going along with the key assumptions of Professor Held and his fellow shills for Saif al Google Gaddafi and his dad- that it was more important to avoid embarrassing Saif al-Google Gaddafi and ruining LSE’s relationship with Libya than to acknowledge the reality of what brand of lipstick they were applying to the face of this particular monster and his dad.

In The Times (££) last week, she’s reported as saying that

The Director has been completely straight about his embarrassment. The council has been completely united in its regret. As a human rights campaigner I can only share bucketloads of both.

Clearly her bucketloads of embarrassment and regret aren’t going to prevent her from staying on as a member of the Council. At least Howard Davies never made any claim to be a national champion of human rights. I suppose some months from now, we’ll be hearing her do an “On the Ropes” broadcast on BBC Radio 4 reflecting on how she bravely overcame this little blip in her career by stonewalling her way through it and looking penitent on “Question Time”.